***Update 3/4 – please make sure you start from chapter 36!***

Contrary to her gloomy predictions, Jinsu had actually made a small but important step forwards by the time Jongdae came in search of her to make sure she ate dinner.  After Baekhyun had silently but reluctantly followed his dismissal earlier in the day, Jinsu had remained in a grieving, homesick funk of despair for a good few hours before natural human resilience began to return and her brain drifted over to school autopilot.  After that, it had still taken her a few hours to get into a proper analytic mode as she scanned through the text, but once she switched, some part of her brain began making connections she hadn’t seen before, and Jongdae had practically had to drag her away from the computers.

“I must have spent at least fifteen minutes staring at it all like, we’re going nowhere with this,” she said brightly between slurping up noodles.  Her right arm twitched in its sling, muscle memory unable to break the habit of gesturing when she spoke with animation.  “And then it suddenly hit me that that was exactly what was in the code: we’re going nowhere.”

Jongdae stole a piece of beef from her plate.  She jabbed a chopstick at him which he avoided.

“But we’re in the timestream.”

“I know.”  Jinsu looked for an opening to purloin something, anything, from Jongdae’s plate to get him back.  His hand was hovering over it, either unconsciously or protectively, which didn’t give her many options.  “Well, actually, we’re not.  There was only an opening of about two and a half seconds when Baekhyun launched us before Minseok’s code bit back, which upset the launching so we only made the Dive just grazing Temp one when the virus got back in control, and then Minseok’s code bit again, so we’re actually hovering in a limbo halfway between the two.  Or rather, a time vacuum.  Every single watch or clock in this place has stopped.”

Jongdae just looked very confused.  “But my phone clock is working perfectly fine.  Says it’s ten to eleven.”

“Yes, but it’s not one of the Attayear watches.  The one in the middle has stopped dead, and so have all the other middle ones.  Look at mine.”

Jongdae was effectively distracted from his food as Jinsu reached her left arm towards him so that he could pull her sleeve back for her.  She took advantage of the moment to pinch an entire rice cake off his plate.

“Hey!” he protested, catching her arm as she chewed on her plunder, but he seemed to get over it pretty quickly once he’d taken a good look at her watch and then at his own.

“How do you know this isn’t all one massive coincidence?” he asked.  “They could just be broken or something.”

“I actually got off my and tried to fix the Lintel clock because initially I thought it was just broken.  Every time I tried to set it, it refused to budge.  I can’t do it with my own watch either.”

Jongdae looked a bit sceptical.  “So you’re basically just really bad with watches.”

“No, Jongdae, look—”  Impatiently, Jinsu placed her chopsticks end to end, then grabbed his to put parallel.  “This is the timestream,” she said.  “Think of it like, I dunno, an actual river or something.  And then we’re sitting here on the bank.”  She grabbed a bottle of soy sauce.  “That’s whichever time we come from.  And this. . .”  She grimaced, picking up a handful of noodles.  The sliminess made her skin crawl.  As quickly as she could, she dumped the noodles between the soysauce and the nearest chopstick.  “This is the vacuum we have to pass through to get from the time we live in into the timestream.  That’s why we have two temporal booms whenever there’s a Dive.  Minseok explained all this when we started the trip to Balhae.  The first boom puts us into a time stasis, and the second kicks us out of it into the timestream.  But you have to be going at a certain speed to keep up with the timestream, and we slipped below it because of the viruses fighting each other and the engine being on its last legs, so we were knocked out of it into the time stasis, or time vacuum, that acts as the buffer zone between our contemporary time in the normal world and being in the timestream.  If it wasn’t there, then anybody would be able to step into the time stream whenever they wanted.  I just initially thought that the time stasis was a state for the machine that it had to pass through, not a. . . place.  Though I don’t know if it’s a place or a space or anything because time doesn’t exist in it.

“But it exists on my phone.”

“Your phone is not with the times, Jongdae, don’t pin all your hopes on it.  It’s an electronic device with no location or time awareness without GPS and satellites so will trudge on regardless.”

Jongdae squinted at her.  “Was that pun intentional?”

“Who cares about puns—?”

“But they’re punny.”

“Oh my God, Jongdae, you’re just as bad as Jimin.”  Jinsu groaned loudly.  “I’ve literally just had a brainwave about the fabric of time in the universe and all you’re interested in is whether or not I unintentionally made a bad joke.”

He chuckled.

“Well, I guess it wasn’t that much of a brainwave,” Jinsu corrected herself in a mumble.  “But at least I know where we are.  As much as anyone ca